Jose Velazquez: I was impressed by the graphic
organizers that the students did. I think they showed a lot of creativity,
a lot of reflection about how to represent the issues in visual ways.
Some students did traditional outlines. Some students did more cartoon
representation. Some students did highlighting and actually put what they
thought would be important statistics that people needed to know to understand
the issues.

I was especially impressed with the group on racial and gender discrimination
because they were really starting from scratch. They had problems with
not only doing the research, but also [with defining] what racial and
gender discrimination is in the context of Newark, New Jersey. I think
they handled that very well. The process of articulating what the problems
were, doing a survey quickly, and then putting together a visual organizer,
I thought went very well.

The oral presentations were very good. As I was [using] the rubric, most
of [what] I was checking off was good to exceptional. They spoke extemporaneously
so they knew the issues. They weren’t reading from papers or documents.
They were very adept at explaining why they thought those issues were
important. Some of them articulated the problems really well. At some
points I had to reinforce them and push them to convert problems to possible
solutions.